Earlier this week, Breezeway announced that the company has raised an additional $8 million in funding led by Schooner Capital, along with Tamarisc Ventures, Krillion Ventures and Launch Capital. This Series A round follows seed funding of approximately $5 million since its launch in 2015, bringing the total amount raised by the company to just over $13 million.
>> Related: Breezeway’s 2020 Vacation Rental Property Operations Report
Background
Breezeway is a technology platform that gives property managers the ability to facilitate and manage housekeeping/maintenance operations, guest and contractor messaging, and safety management. Based in Boston, Jeremy Gall (who also cofounded FlipKey in 2007) launched Breezway in 2016 with the help of initial investors, including Jason Sprenkle of Key Data Dashboard. According to its site, “Breezeway’s property care and operations platform helps coordinate, communicate, and verify detailed work, and deliver the best service experience to clients.”
Additional announcements
The company also announced that it has added Peter Andruszkiewicz to its integrations team and Simon Lehmann to its board of directors.
Peter Andruszkiewicz joined Breezeway after serving five years at Airbnb where he started as a regional market manager servicing the New England area and advanced through the company to head up strategic API partnerships for North America.
Simon Lehmann has been a leader in the hospitality industry since 2005 as CEO at Interhome, president of Phocuswright, CEO of Biketec, and deputy CEO of the Hotelplan-Gruppe. In 2018, Lehmann founded AJL Consulting and was added to BookingPal’s board of directors.
“The product and company are uniquely positioned to change the standards for what it means to manage interactions at physical space,” Lehmann said about Breezeway. “In addition to Jeremy, the team is made up of people with deep roots in the vacation rental industry: former property managers, industry suppliers, safety experts, etc. They understand the complexities of managing vacation rentals and are determined to deliver market-leading tools to make it easier to coordinate and verify the cleanliness, safety and quality of the experience for guests and owners.”
Q&A with Breezeway Founder Jeremy Gall
We reached out to Breezeway’s founder, Jeremy Gall, to learn more about the funding and company’s trajectory.
Q: With the new funds, what can VRMs expect to see from Breezeway?
Jeremy Gall (JG): Expect to see us invest heavily in our product to help improve how managers perform the detailed work of preparing and maintaining homes and delivering hospitality service to guests and owners. We have built comprehensive software for property care, operations and communication, but there’s still so much more value that we can bring to property managers through additions to our platform.
Q: How has the pandemic affected Breezeway and the team?
JG: We were fortunate, thanks to a team that is dedicated to our mission and each other, to keep everyone on the team through the pandemic. We even added a few folks, most recently Peter Andruszkiewicz, who previously was running API partnerships at Airbnb. We now have thirty people distributed in California, North Carolina, Washington, Maine, and Europe, in addition to the core team in Boston. Everyone has been working remotely since March and while it was a transition at first, we’re finding creative ways to build upon our team unity and culture.
As we all know, the pandemic brought travel to a standstill, and then vacation rental demand came roaring back in many markets. Even managers that had been on top of their operations for years struggled with the whipsaw nature of going from zero to sixty as markets opened up. Safety and quality are the key trends in travel and vacation rentals. There is so much more sensitivity to how property is maintained and prepared carefully, and this dynamic has been building for years. The pandemic has added to that and we’ll see this continued emphasis in the industry.
Q: Will you be pushing out a homeowner product to the mix?
JG: We’re focused on professional operators because that is where hospitality, vacation rentals and property management services are headed. We will be adding homeowner products in the future. However, they won’t be the type that folks typically think of. But before that, we have some really exciting products to announce in the coming months.
Q: Were any of these investors already invested in the company?
JG: Yes, many of our existing investors participated in this round. We have a shared vision with our investors of the role that detailed service is going to play in the future of property management and the opportunity for Breezeway.
Breezeway recently released a study titled 2020 Vacation Rental Property Operation Report, which surveyed over 200 professional vacation rental managers to “measure how professionals are enhancing their property care programs to better deliver predictable, safe and high-quality vacation rental experiences in 2020 during travel’s new normal.”
Jeremy Gall will be speaking about the role of property data in revenue management at the upcoming Vacation Rental Data and Revenue Conference, September 15–17.
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